Roberti Decides to Poll Voters About Supervisorial Candidacy

DAVID IN WONDERLAND: Moving cautiously in uncharted political waters, state Sen. David Roberti (D-Van Nuys) plans to conduct a poll in the next few days to test voter reaction to his possible run for the seat of retiring Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman.

“Doing the poll is important for a jillion reasons,” Roberti said Wednesday. Most of all, of course, it will be used to give Roberti a better fix on how he would stack up against Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who formally entered the Edelman succession race Tuesday.

The Roberti camp reportedly will be most keen to learn how their standard-bearer’s pro-life position plays; what his strengths are among Jewish and Republican voters; whether his leadership of the state Senate during a time of legislative scandals is a handicap; and how voters view his support for gun control and the breakup of the Los Angeles school district.

Yaroslavsky partisans say their man, who headed a Soviet Jewry support group in the 1970s, can expect to sweep the district’s influential bloc of 150,000 Jewish voters. But Roberti has enjoyed strong support in the Jewish community too, and, as the senator notes, Edelman’s 3rd District is ethnically diverse. “It’s got 70,000 Latino voters and 26,000 Asian voters,” Roberti noted.

Meanwhile, Roberti protested that it would be unfair to judge his entire public record on his abortion stand. “If that’s the only issue I’m going to be judged on, then I should retire from politics right now,” Roberti said.

The state Senate leader also said there is bipartisan interest in his candidacy. “I might point out that I’m getting an awful lot of Republican support,” Roberti said. “If this district was much more Republican than it is now, we’d see a Republican running for it.”

Voter registration in the Edelman district is 30% Republican, 56% Democratic and about 18% Jewish, according to Jim Hayes of Political Data Inc., a political research firm.

“We politicians often live in a wonderland,” Roberti said. “Polls can confirm our fondest wishes or disabuse us of them.”

And speaking of polls, in 1988, pollster Arnold Steinberg did a survey for a 40-year-old Yaroslavsky, then a budding mayoral candidate. The results convinced him that it was futile to run against Tom Bradley.

Right or wrong, Steinberg took some flak from Yaroslavsky supporters who felt their champion had been too easily swayed by the pollster’s numbers. So who’s likely to do the Roberti poll? Steinberg.

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DOMINOS: A new contender is preparing to enter the 40th Assembly District race to succeed incumbent Barbara Friedman. She is Francine Oschin, 50, of Encino, who has been a top aide to Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson since 1989.

Oschin, who would run in the Democratic primary, has been Bernson’s point person on transportation issues and has advised her boss on some of his more sensitive initiatives, including a failed proposal to have the council support the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District and a proposal to revamp the city’s controversial new water rates. Friedman (D-Van Nuys) is expected to vacate her Assembly seat to run for Roberti’s Senate post.

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SPEAKING IN CODE: Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) was prepared for tough questions when he stood before a crowd of 500 in the Cal State Northridge Student Union last weekend.

Just the night before, at a similar town hall meeting in the Antelope Valley, he was assailed by representatives of Ross Perot’s United We Stand organization protesting his last-minute change of heart in voting for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

And, sure enough, a wave of constituent wrath arose almost the minute McKeon finished a detailed, soul-searching analysis of that decision.

But it wasn’t about NAFTA.

So what was on the voters’ minds?

The name Northridge. Seems that 30 years ago, the U. S. Postal Service took a chunk of about 1,000 houses on the community’s eastern flank and routed their mail through the Sepulveda post office with a Sepulveda ZIP code. That meant people who knew they lived in Northridge had to tell all their friends and creditors they lived in another town or risk losing their mail. And sometimes they lost it anyway.

After the first speaker from the audience explained this, McKeon promised he’d have his staff get on it. Then he braced for the next question of national importance.

But a second speaker revived the ZIP code business, sarcastically warning that he might find the postal bureaucracy tough to crack, with Bernson having worked on the case for a decade without success.

McKeon rebutted. The councilman was a local official and this was a federal matter. He’d get his staff right on it.

When a third speaker returned to the subject, McKeon let a grin of disbelief escape. But by the time the fifth one rose to vent, he was ready to negotiate.

He’d make it a priority. He’d put the weight of his office behind it. He’d solve the problem. But could they please choose a leader so he wouldn’t have to deal with every one of them? And, could they please move on to a new subject, say NAFTA?

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PERSPECTIVES: When President Clinton made his second trip to the San Fernando Valley last week, his greeting party at Rockwell International in Canoga Park included three of the area’s veteran congressmen. Each took something different away from the encounter.

During the President’s town hall meeting, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) applauded Clinton’s references to Calstart, the Burbank-based initiative to establish a regional advanced transportation industry. In particular, Berman was pleased to hear Clinton say in response to a question that his Administration would not override any states seeking to adopt regulations requiring the sale of non-polluting vehicles.

“This is important to drive the development of the technology for electric and fuel-cell powered vehicles,” said Berman, an architect of Calstart. “It relieved our concern tremendously that the Big 3 (auto makers) would make promises about all they would do to try to bring down the level of emissions but would want as a quid pro quo the banning of these efforts” by individual states.

Rep. Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale), one of two Republican lawmakers in attendance, urged Clinton to do whatever he can to speed the cleanup of chemically tainted ground water at the former Lockheed Corp. site in Burbank. This could allow Lockheed to sell the properties to developers when they are deemed environmentally sound.

During the town hall meeting, Moorhead referred to the vacant area around the old Lockheed Skunk Works site where top-secret military aircraft was built for decades. The company is cleaning up soil and ground water at its property and has signed a consent agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency to take the lead in designing, building and operating a large-scale water treatment system to clean up water tapped by nearby Burbank municipal wells.

“I told him I thought it was important to get that straightened out,” Moorhead said.

Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) described Clinton as “excited and pumped up by the experience” of meeting for 3 1/2 hours with the region’s residents.

“The most impressive thing about him is his empathy for people and people’s problems,” Beilenson said. “I’m sure it’s good politics and good PR, but he himself feels good about personal contacts with people in the real world. He really makes himself available in a way that Presidents usually don’t.”

This column was reported by Times staff writers John Schwada and Doug Smith in Los Angeles, Cynthia H. Craft in Sacramento and Alan C. Miller in Washington, D.C.